Written in Dead Wax (39 page)

When the red-haired woman had beaten us to the punch.

When Nevada had beaten us to the punch.

I eased the record out of the inner sleeve and checked the dead wax. Then I got out our chart and added the information.

“So you’ve got the diary now,” said Tinkler.

“Ree tracked down Wilburt Sassman, the guy who stole it, through eBay. He’d covered his tracks pretty well in other regards but he couldn’t resist buying and selling paraphernalia online. She actually bought something from him, incognito, and got hold of his address that way.”

“And now you’ve got the diary you know everything.”

“We know
some
things,” I said. “The diary is fragmentary. The earliest surviving page of any interest describes Rita Mae and her husband the dentist holding a party. The dentist had a lot of money and he certainly knew how to throw a bash. Nat King Cole was there, Pete Rugolo was there. Rita Mae sang a duet with Nat, with Pete playing the piano. Then the dentist calls for silence and he makes this big tasteless announcement about how the ‘rabbit died’ which is his way of saying he’s knocked up his sexy young wife and she’s mortified with embarrassment, but everybody is toasting her health with champagne and refilling her glass for her.”

“Because in those days giving a pregnant woman champagne was still the done thing.”

“Right.”

“A simpler, happier age,” said Tinkler.

“She’s a frustrating diarist, Rita Mae.”

“How so?”

“There’ll be two pages about getting a new hairstyle she saw in a magazine, and then she’ll mention a gig with the cream of the West Coast jazz set, singing at the Lighthouse, and dismiss it in two lines. But there is some crucial stuff. Like when she describes the reign of terror by that cop.”

“The cop called Ox.”

“That’s him. His crusade against jazz musicians, and the more famous the better, is recorded in frightening detail in these pages. So we get to hear how Art Pepper comes out of a session with Marty Paich and finds Ox waiting for him. He busts Pepper for heroin he planted in Pepper’s car. Another time it’s Chet Baker. Then Ox almost nails Gerry Mulligan. He has absolutely no compunction about planting evidence. And these people go away to prison for
years
. No one is safe.”

“Like you said, a reign of terror.”

“Exactly. So that’s the atmosphere at the time. And then we get to the Hathor sessions.”

I could hear Tinkler exhale on the other side of the world. “So there is some stuff about the Hathor sessions?”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I said. “I’ve typed up the most important passages on my laptop. I’ll email them to you for safe keeping.”

“I’ll keep them safe. Send them now.”

* * *

Thursday January 13th

Bobby Schoolcraft has a brand-new cream Mercedes-Benz 300 SL.

(There then follows a couple of pages on the virtues of this car. Ree certainly got her obsession with automobiles from her grandmother.)

Bobby also has a stunning new girlfriend Tilly, a colored girl. When I sat down with her I discovered there were two dogs under the table, licking my toes. They were the cutest little black and brown dogs. Cavalier King Charles Spaniels.

Easy Geary joined us. The piano in the joint was okay so he agreed to play. Easy said that Bobby got the dogs because this breed are called Black and Tans. He said, “Get it? It’s the world’s most obvious Duke Ellington gag.” He’s pretty amused by Bobby.

And then there’s a maddening gap that would have covered the entire period we’re interested in: the launching of Hathor Records and their first album and everything else we’d give our eyeteeth to know about.

But Rita Mae was a sporadic diarist.

In fact “sporadic” is a polite word for it.

Then she starts writing again. To make sense of what follows you have to remember that by the 1950s AMI had become a multi-million-dollar corporation, having built an empire with the money they’d earned from the music of Burns Hobartt. Though “earned” isn’t the word I should use. “Stolen” would be more like it. Anyway, they were now extremely powerful, in all sorts of ways.

By the time of the next diary entry the little record company, Hathor, is already reeling from the legal battle with AMI. But they refuse to quit. At one point Rita Mae writes:

It’s like an elephant stomping on a mouse. And then the mouse gets up and comes back to challenge the elephant again.

But by now Bobby Schoolcraft is almost broke. Rita Mae is working for him as a secretary, without pay, to help.

Wednesday February 16th

A man came in to the office just as we were opening up for the day. His aftershave was so strong I couldn’t tell if I smelled booze on him or not. I thought I did. He said his name was Oliver Xavier and Mr Schoolcraft was expecting him. So I let him go back into Bobby’s office.

He came back out a few minutes later and smiled and said, “By the way, are you one of our colored friends?” Bobby must have heard him talking because he came racing out of the office. I told the man that my dark skin is due to my Italianate heritage. “Nice story,” he said and tipped his hat and left. Bobby was white as a sheet. “Do you know who that was?” he said. “That was Ox.”

Thursday February 17th

Something has happened to Bobby’s Mercedes. It has been completely vandalised. I saw it, and it’s a complete wreck. All the windows and headlights smashed, tyres slashed, dents all over the bodywork. The leather seats are slashed too and somebody peed all over them. I’m so upset. I know how he loved that car.

Friday March 4th

Something terrible happened. Bobby and Tilly were coming home from a club last night and, as they drove up towards their house, they saw something in the headlights of their car. Something on the gateposts, on either side of their driveway. They stopped and got out. It was the heads of their little dogs, Duke and Fantasy. Someone had killed them and cut off their heads and left them there, one on each gatepost.

Tilly had to be sedated.

Those poor little dogs.

Saturday March 5th

I went to Bobby’s house. Easy Geary was there too. Bobby said he knows who killed the dogs. It was Ox. He wrecked Bobby’s car, too. Ox is trying to intimidate Bobby, to get him to settle the lawsuit with AMI. Bobby is challenging their right to put the Davenports’ names on Burns Hobartt’s compositions. And it looks like AMI thinks he might win. So they’ve hired Ox as their hammer man. Tilly wants him to cave in. But Easy is urging him to keep fighting. I’ve never seen Easy so angry. If he knew where he could find Ox I think he would do something terrible. He has an awful temper. They say he once pulled a knife on Billy Eckstine.

Tuesday March 15th

Bobby’s colored girlfriend Tilly is in hospital. She was driving home alone last night and Ox pulled her over. He took her into an alley and beat her up. Bobby wants her to tell what happened but she won’t. Ox has two cops who swear she was drunk and attacked him. If she tries to report Ox they will swear charges against her. She’s too frightened to ever report Ox.

He beat her up really badly. He kicked her in the stomach, so she miscarried.

He did it deliberately.

He called it “Irish birth control”.

Thursday March 24th

Bobby is frantic. Tilly has disappeared. Her family won’t tell him where she went. They think it’s his fault she almost got killed. I think she’s gone to Paris. Poor Bobby is beside himself. He says he can’t go on without her.

Thursday March 31st

Bobby is dead. He shot himself.

The phone rang in the middle of the night. Ree woke up before I did. She answered it. “Tinkler,” she said, handing me the phone and crawling back under the covers.

I took the phone into the next room, sleep ebbing from my brain, and said, “You do know what time it is?”

“Of course. When you insist on travelling to the other side of the planet the eight-hour time difference is the price you pay.”

“Why are you calling me?”

“I read the diary entries you sent. And I can’t wait for the next batch. I had to call and get you to read it to me now. Don’t worry about typing it up and emailing it. Just read it to me.”

“I can’t.”

“Look, I’m sorry, I know it’s late and I probably woke up and pissed off your sexy new American girlfriend, in fact I know I definitely did, but forgive me anyway and read me the rest of the diary.”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t punish me. Don’t make me wait.”

“No, I mean I literally can’t. That’s all there is.”

There was a pause and then he said, “It can’t be.”

“Rita Mae never wrote another word. At least not in that year’s diary. All the remaining pages are blank.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line as, across the ocean in England, Tinkler came to terms with this.

“Shit,” he said.

The next morning Ree said, “What was all that about?”

“Tinkler couldn’t wait to read the next diary entry. I had to break it to him that there wasn’t one.”

I looked at the diary, lying on the table in a square of morning sunlight. It was a strange feeling to have got this far and to know that it was the end of the line. Now we would never get the story of the recording session. We’d never know exactly what happened on that day in 1955.

I picked up the diary. It was warm to the touch. I flipped through it idly.

As I did so, a slight but emphatic smell rose up to my nostrils. Faintly intoxicating, promising a headache, reminiscent of childhood construction projects.

Glue.

The heat of the sunlight had caused the smell to come out of the pages. I stared at the diary, spread open loosely in my hands. I thumbed carefully through to the last entry and studied it. I got up and carried it to the window and held it in the sunlight. Ree was standing in the kitchen pouring cereal into a bowl. She was watching me.

“What is it?” she said.

I held the diary in the sunlight. The pages were made of high-quality paper, which hadn’t yellowed much in over half a century. They were ruled with thin blue horizontal lines. There were two pages allotted to each day’s entry. The date and the day of the week were printed at the top of the left-hand page.

The final, terse entry only occupied one line of the left-hand page.

I studied the blank page opposite, trying to see any difference in the colour of the paper.

There was none.

As far as I could see, it was exactly the same paper, aged to exactly the same extent of yellowing. It was the same weight and thickness. The pale blue lines were precisely aligned with those on the left-hand page.

Then I noticed it.

There was an extra line at the bottom of the page.

Ree was standing at my side now, drawn over by my intense silence as I scrutinised the diary. “Look,” I said. I put my finger beside the bottom line on the right-hand page. On the page to the left of it there was nothing, just the empty space of the bottom margin.

“Maybe it’s a printing mistake,” said Ree. I flipped through the rest of the diary. The remaining pages were all the same—one extra line.

“If it is, it’s a consistent one,” I said, pausing with it open at the following day, April 1st.

“Maybe it’s an April Fool’s Day joke,” said Ree, “by the printers.”

I stared at the date. That was when I spotted something else.

I flipped back to the previous day, then back to April 1st again. I was right. There wasn’t any doubt about it.

The typeface for the day and the date on April 1st were different from the one for March 31st. I showed Ree. “It’s almost identical…”

“But not quite.”

We stared at each other. She was still holding the bowl of cereal, forgotten in her hands. I said, “Would you be heartbroken if I was to dismantle your grandmother’s diary?”

“Dismantle it?”

“We can always put it back together again.” I borrowed the clasp knife she had got from Berto. We spread the diary wide and flat on a table, open at the last entry. I ran the knife blade carefully down the join between the left- and right-hand pages. It came apart surprisingly easily.

And a strong smell of glue rose up.

Opened up like this we could see the binding of each set of pages. The pages to the left were bound at the back with red cloth. Those on the right with green cloth. “They’re from two different diaries,” said Ree.

“The little bastard pulled a switch on us.”

“No wonder he was gone such a long time when he went to fetch it. He was busy with scissors and glue.”

We were back in the sun-dappled cul-de-sac in Downey, on Wilburt Sassman’s doorstep. Ree was standing beside me as I pressed the doorbell. Nothing. Silence. I pressed it again, looking at her.

“It’s dead.” The word rang ominously in the silence.

We tried the door and it opened, into the cool, quiet shadows of the house. We stepped inside, the door easing shut behind us on a hydraulic hinge. There was something odd about the silence, and then I remembered. Last time there had been the bubbling of the fish tanks.